Nov. 7, 2020, 9:17 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
By
Annie Karni
Rethinking the causes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat: Should the 2020 results prompt a reassessment?
Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in 2016.Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times
There was one subset of the political world that felt vindicated by the nail-biter presidential race: Democrats who worked for Hillary Clinton. The closeness of the Biden-Trump race suggests that the 2016 election outcome may have been less about Mrs. Clinton’s political weaknesses than it was about Mr. Trump’s political strengths.
In some of the states that Mr. Biden managed to flip, like Wisconsin, his victory was by a slim margin of about 20,000 votes. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton lost the state by about 22,000. A potential victory with more than 300 electoral votes would look like a blowout for Mr. Biden, but it would also mask the fact that in some of the most critical states, the race was still only won by a hair.
Mr. Biden has not received the wide margins nationwide that many liberals had been hoping for. The silver lining for some former members of Clintonworld, as one put it: The 2016 Democratic nominee might not go down in history as the political version of Bill Buckner, who blew the World Series for the Red Sox in 1986 by letting a ground ball go through his legs.
“His electoral strength in 2016 had less to do with any shortcomings of Hillary Clinton as a candidate or of her campaign than with Trump’s own appeal to a broad segment of the population,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and a member of the D.N.C.’s executive committee, said of Mr. Trump. “We need as Democrats to understand that and confront it more effectively going forward.”
Philippe Reines, a former top adviser to Mrs. Clinton both in the Senate and at the State Department, was even more blunt. “Hillary’s owed more than a few apologies for how her campaign was assessed,” Mr. Reines said. Jennifer Palmieri, who served as communications director for the 2016 Clinton campaign, said that the current election gives a new perspective to the race four years ago.
“There’s only so much you can do to ameliorate larger forces,” Ms. Palmieri said. “When I see young Latino and African-American men siding with Trump in a way they didn’t in 2016, I don’t fault the Biden campaign’s African-American radio program. It is a symptom of a larger change that’s happening.”
ya ok
this is not a liberal idea, Medicare for all would be.
